From helping you generate a caption for an Instagram post to guessing what your next word will be before you type it, artificial intelligence (AI) creates unoriginality under the guise of helpfulness. It is undeniable that AI has helped society advance in many ways. However, there are many drawbacks that must be considered before we integrate AI into our everyday lives.
Most importantly, how does it affect human dignity?
At a glance, AI seems like a large step towards a technologically advanced future. It has made many advancements in the medical field, such as its ability to accelerate the process of creating new drugs and helping detect skin cancer.
However, it is important to note that nothing AI does is without the work of everything real people have personally achieved and archived online. It does not have the ability to create, so it should not be used by anyone searching for originality. It gains its knowledge by stealing the words and ideas from other people.
Cornelia Walther mentioned this in her article, “AI and the Death of Originality,” stating, “This is why so much AI-generated text feels oddly familiar. It’s not just you – there is real risk that AI is accelerating a form of cognitive entropy, where the same insights are recycled endlessly, making it harder to distinguish fresh ideas from old ones dressed in new packaging.”
AI becomes off-putting for everyone involved when it is not introduced properly. Nobody likes to call the doctor and have a robot answer the phone. In the same sense, the workers who have to work with these robots are likely unhappy with it as well. In her article “The Rise of AI Resentment at Work,” Dr. Diane Hamilton explained, “If workers aren’t involved in AI implementation, they often see it as something being done to them rather than for them.”
It is common for people to feel threatened by the advancement of AI. Whether they are workers fearing for their job safety, or everyday citizens worried about their family. After all, AI theft does not end at stealing our written voices, but our real voices as well.
New technology has made it so that a simple TikTok or YouTube videos can now have disastrous consequences. With new technology AI can extract your voice from videos and use it however it wants. AI’s voice cloning capabilities have not only affected the lives of everyday people, but large government figures as well.
One example of this was given by Kevin Collier on the NBC News website, he warned, “A flashpoint moment came during the Democratic primaries last year, when robocalls of a fake Joe Biden spammed the phones of voters telling them not to vote.” While laws and precautions against robocalls were made after this, it is still nearly impossible to tell whether or not a voice is real or AI.
While this knowledge may cause panic, it is important to recall that AI cannot function without the people. AI is a helpful tool, and nothing more than a tool. To maintain our human dignity, we must be conscious of how much we depend on AI. We cannot let it steal our voices – whether that be our actual voices, our ideas or our ability to function on our own.